The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

When You’ve Got a Military Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, US-China Edition

Both the United States and the PRC are displaying a
disturbing predisposition toward militarizing their national security
strategies.It is understandable.An external military threat is easier to sell
and explain than a complex national challenge of economic, social, and
political competitiveness, and there is a large and influential coterie of
officers, natsec types, and defense contractors that welcomes a military
framing.

But the devil is in the details—the actual implementation of
a successful policy—something that both the US and the PRC are, one can only
hope, considering.

It describes the primary dynamic of the PRC’s maritime
strategy: designing its program of regional assertiveness/encroachments in a
way that prevents militarization of frictions and, in particular, avoids direct
military confrontation with the United States.

On the one hand, the PRC throws its weight around with oil
rigs, maritime surveillance vessels, and coast guard ships; on the other hand,
the PLA Navy is a virtually invisible player when it comes to PRC moves in the
East and South China Seas.

At the same time, the PRC conducts a discrete bromance with
the US Navy.

Recently, the PRC participated in a US-organized naval
get-together, RIMPAC, in Hawaii, and made the seemingly provocative decision to
send a spy ship to shadow the exercise within the US Exclusive Economic Zone.Not a provocation, I opined, but a
concession.

Previously, the PRC argued that military surveillance within
its EEZ by US Navy vessels such as the USS Impeccable was illegal and, in 2009,
made a point of harassing the Impeccable as it sailed back and forth inside the
PRC EEZ off Hainan Island.

This gambit backfired spectacularly as Hillary Clinton used
it as the justification for declaring the US interest in “freedom of navigation”
at the ASEAN meeting in 2010, and a fulcrum upon which to hang the US pivot to
Asia.

Since then, the PRC has for the most part backpedaled in order to
provide no pretext for the US to accuse it of impeding freedom of
navigation of US military vessels, and thereby remove "freedom of
navigation" from the State Department's menu of actionable PRC
transgressions in the South China Sea.

At the same time, the US Navy argued that a close
reading of the Law of the Sea treaty (the US hasn’t signed it but the US Navy
uses it as a guide for its multifarious activities in other peoples’ EEZs and
territorial waters) did not preclude passage of US military vessels within the
Chinese EEZ even if their activities were detrimental to the PRC’s security.

To strengthen its case, the US Navy also went the extra mile
of confirming that it was actually tracking PLAN submarines and not just
mapping the ocean floor, an activity that could be construed as having dual
military/economic significance and therefore falling within UNCLOS
jurisdiction.

So, I concluded, when the PRC sent a spy ship to RIMPAC
inside the US EEZ it was tacitly acknowledging the US Navy's interpretation.And, given the PRC’s current unwillingness to
aggravate the US military unnecessarily, that interpretation makes pretty good
sense.

Admiral Locklear, while less than thrilled about the
presence of the spy ship, agrees:

“The good news about
this is it’s a recognition, I think, or acceptance by the Chinese that what
we’ve been saying to them for some time is that military operations and survey
operations in another country’s [maritime zones] are within international law
and are acceptable, and this is a fundamental right that nations have,” Adm.
Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters at
the Pentagon on Tuesday.

So far so good.

However, diplomats and security brainiacs in the US, Japan,
Philippines, and, potentially, Vietnam, are trying to find ways to counter
Chinese non-military tactics by finding ways to redefine situations in military
terms so that the overwhelming US military superiority (and its availability to
Japan and the Philippines as treaty allies) can be brought to bear against the
PRC.

The term of art for this repackaging is “grey zone conflicts”.This formulation has become a standard
feature of Japanese defense planning; as US frustration with PRC non-military
moves in the South China Sea has grown, it has also crept into discussions of
what the United States can do to up its game on behalf of the Philippines and,
potentially, Vietnam.

In the Japanese context, the scenarios involve deploying
military force to deal with an ostensibly non-military PRC seizure of the Senkakus,
or forcing a worrisome PLAN submarine to surface near Japan.In the South China Sea, the scenarios haven’t
been fleshed out in the public sphere, but I suspect they involve things like
interposing US Navy vessels between Philippine fishing vessels or oil
exploration vessels and PRC ships at points of contention like Scarborough Shoal
or Reed Bank.

I am pretty skeptical of the idea that PRC non-military
moves should be countered with a military response and I have a certain
suspicion that some within the US uniformed defense establishment feel the same
way.Japanese military boffins and the Pentagon are
continually hashing over “gray zone” definitions and rules of engagement and,
in my opinion, the Japanese government has been leveraging its willingness to
support a US priority—Japanese “collective self defense”—in order to obtain US
support in “gray zone” scenarios.

Also as a matter of personal opinion, I must say that I
consider the US push for “collective self defense” a strategic boondoggle even
more flawed than the “pivot to Asia”, which is really saying something.

I find the US obsession with “CSD”—the idea that Japanese
military forces must engage in war stuff not directly related to defense of the
Japanese homeland—somewhat mystifying.Apparently, Pentagon planners are getting extremely nervous about the
arms buildup in Asia—which tracks GDP growth and, therefore, is getting pretty
darn big—and its implications for US military hegemony.

The idea is to combine US and Japanese muscle
and field a bigger, more deterrent-credible force (in fact, I wonder if AirSea
Battle—the total war with the PRC from the Malacca Straits up to Hokkaido
scenario—was cooked up simply to demonstrate the impossibility of the US
funding and implementing a completely dominant force in Asia by itself).

Japan is supposed to contribute its local strengths in
minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, and aerial surveillance, at least in the
initial stage.

I guess the idea was “Japan can’t be a freerider anymore and
needs to have some skin in the Asia-Pacific security game”.

Well, as far as I can tell, Japan under so-called “pacifist”
constitution already had plenty of skin in the game—because it seems most
credible US-PRC WWIII scenarios all involve US bases on Honshu and, in
particular, long-suffering Okinawa, getting nuked.

That’s an agency problem—people on the same team but
bringing divergent objectives--a problem the US avoided when it ran the
military show unilaterally.Now, by
trying to integrate Japanese forces into the US command, we’re giving an
operational voice to people who face an immediate threat of getting blown up
during the implementation of our grand strategy. Collective self-defense, to my mind, complicates and compromises the US deterrent posture.

In my opinion, if we feel we need to field more minesweepers
and ASW and Orions to deter the Chicom menace, we should pay for them ourselves
instead of hoping for a perfect understanding with our Japanese allies if and
when World War III rolls around.

The agency problem has already revealed itself with Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to re-establish Japan as a “normal” nation
i.e. not constrained by the pacifist constitution imposed by the US after Japan’s
defeat in World War II and able to necessary/useful/useless/and/or catastrophically
stupid things in the realm of security affairs, just like any other regional
power.

CSD—since it permitted the Japanese military to abandon a
pure territorial-defense posture—was embraced by the Abe administration.

The Abe administration swung behind CSD and sold it—rather unsuccessfully,
I should say, to an extremely skeptical Japanese public—with fanciful justifications
like “without CSD Japan couldn’t shoot down a North Korean ballistic missile headed
for the United States”.

Actually, the genuine attraction of CSD is that it allows
Japan to pursue military relationships with neighboring countries i.e.
implement a full-feature foreign policy including defense and security elements
as well as the economic and other soft power carrots that sustained Japan’s regional presence over
the last half-century.

And these foreign policy tools also allow Prime Minister Abe to pursue his preferred regional strategy—exacerbating tensions with the
PRC just enough to push the Pacific democracies plus Vietnam away from the PRC
and onto the Japanese security and, most importantly, economic side of a
zero-sum equation.

Abe, it should be noted, is no America-firster.Like many Japanese conservatives, he rejects the World War II victor’s
narrative and, like Putin, considers his nation’s diminished international
clout as a tragedy and not a matter of geopolitical justice.In his US preferences, Abe is politically and
emotionally inclined toward the Dick Cheney end of the ideological spectrum and
does not consider it his main obligation and mission to smooth the way for
Barack Obama in Asia.He’s looking out
for Number 1—Japan—and caters to—and exploits—US preoccupations accordingly.

For those who pay attention, the CSD shoe dropped in July,
as Japan’s ambassador to the Philippines addressed the significance of the
cabinet decision that “reinterpreted” the constitution to allow CSD:

Japan’s ambassador to
the Philippines, Toshinao Urabe, says the proposed “reinterpretation” of
Japan's pacifist constitution would allow it to help if a country it has a
“close relationship” with is attacked.

This means it would help defend the U.S., which is its only mutual defense
treaty ally. Urabe said under the treaty, Japan is not obligated to use
force in helping. The reinterpretation would enable it to do so.

But Urabe told reporters at a forum in Manila Thursday that in the case of
other countries like the Philippines, which he said Japan also has a close
relationship with, it would “depend on the situation.” He said Japan is
most concerned with protecting its nationals if they are in vulnerable security
situations.

“But basically this is a policy to defend ourselves in various situations which
were not conceived before. And I think it’s important to make necessary
preparation to various security situations,” Urabe stated.

…

Richard Heydarian is a
Manila-based Asia geopolitical analyst. He said the proposal is widely
seen as a way to keep China in check. “On one hand this will make it
easier for Mr. Abe to have much more robust countermeasures against China’s
territorial provocations in the Senkaku-Diaoyu,” he explained.

Heydarian said it is also a way for Japan to gain a foothold as a major
security player in the region. He points out that Japan is bolstering its
image as a security counterbalance to China that the 10-member Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can depend on.

There you have it.Instead of a unitary hub and spoke arrangement by which the United
States, as the big kahuna, manages its ROK, Japan, and Philippines alliances bilaterally and monopolizes the Asian security space, CSD lays the foundation
for a dual-hub system by which Japan constructs its own security arrangements
with the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, and India in order to
advance its own diplomatic, security, and economic agenda in Asia…which may
involve working with Japan’s local interlocutors to accentuate the polarity
between the PRC and its neighbors even when the United States for reasons of
its own might be trying to wind down tensions.

CSD, in other words, accelerates the marginalization of the
United States, rather than assuring its ascendancy.So, I don’t think the US foreign policy
establishment should be slapping itself on the back for its great job in
finally getting CSD on the books.

By the Peter Lee Law of Foreign Policy Verbiage—the amount
of government and think tank output is directly proportionate to the bankruptcy
of the policy it is meant to explain, justify, defend, repair, and/or obfuscate—I
expect CSD to generate thousands upon thousands of pages of analysis and recommendations,
as well as steady paychecks for hundreds upon hundreds of experts in the
United States and Japan.

I also expect the new arrangement to contribute to a clutch
of ugly regional crises in the years to come, especially if Hillary Clinton
wins the presidency and accelerates the pivot dynamic of confrontation &
polarization that enlarged the diplomatic space for the US in its role as the
dominant military force in Asia.

A prominent US China policy insider, Robert Sutter, made the case for
putting Hong Kong democracy and Taiwan independence in play in order to
generate additional pressure points on the PRC.Actually, Sutter carefully deployed
the passive voice in characterizing China’s vulnerabilities and, essentially, advocated
threatening to put them in play, an
important distinction since, once the US has signaled its support, local
activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan will seize control of events, Japan will be
tempted to stir the pot, and the United States will find itself as little more
than a passenger on the freedom train.

I expect Hillary Clinton will feel compelled to demonstrate
the muscularity of her own presidency in contrast to the “leading from behind”
drift displayed by President Obama in his second term.The possibility exists that the Taiwan
presidential elections will produce deadlock and an atmosphere of national
crisis—abetted by a Maidanesque group of “Sunflower” student activists whose
anti-KMT inclination is ripe for amplification by the pro-independence DPP
opposition—that Clinton and Abe might find irresistible.

Ex-president and independence avatar Lee Teng-hui recently
voiced the opinion that the Senkakus belong to Japan (Taiwan’s right to the Senkakus—a
claim that, I might add, is very persuasive to anyone who looks at a map or,
for that matter, knows that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger
also had strong feelings about the legitimacy of Taiwan’s position-- is a
central plank of President Ma Ying-jyeou’s policy). If the DPP decides to cement its already
strong ties to the conservative wing of Japanese politics by repudiating the
ROC’s claims to the Senkakus, or even taking the next step of agitating for
independence under the assumption that the US and Japan will decide that
respect for the One China policy (and for that matter, for a certain degree of
stability and control over events in East Asia) must take a back seat to
Taiwanese self-determination, things could get very interesting for the PRC’s
Xi Jinping.

Of course, Xi Jinping has not been sitting idly by.

He has acted forcefully and pre-emptively to insulate the
CCP against the kind of shenanigans the US has deployed against the Russian
Federation during the Ukraine imbroglio: delegitimization in the Western media,
encouragement of democratic dissent, and sanctions keyed to US dominance of the
global financial system.

A Taiwan crisis, therefore, may not compel the CCP to roll
the dice in an existential war to sustain its claims to sovereignty in the Han
homeland.

The western borders, however, offer challenges to control
that the CCP has not yet demonstrably mastered.

I believe the most interesting and disturbing developments
have taken place in Xinjiang, home to almost 9 million Uighurs who might interpret a
crisis over the sovereignty of Taiwan and Hong Kong as an opportunity to
advance their own claims to self-determination.Conditions have already become extremely fraught.In recent weeks there have been multiple
bloody incidents, including one involving nearly one hundred fatalities (the
World Uyghur Congress, an émigré group under the leadership of Rebiya Kadeer,
has claimed actual fatalities were 2000, an assertion that under other
circumstances might be open to dismissal but now merits some more serious
consideration) and can be spun as the massacre of Uighur demonstrators by Han
security forces, an attack fomented by a group of aggrieved Islamists, or
something in between.

US incitement is currently not on the table, even though the
World Uyghur Congress, which sedulously tends its relations with the US
government, has taken to calling Xinjiang “East Turkestan”, thereby throwing
its hat in the ring on behalf of independence.Therefore, Western news outlets are bedeviled by the issue of whether
the Chinese characterization of terrorists should be adopted, or whether the
verbose formulation of “aggrieved Uighurs spontaneously venting their anger
against an unjust and oppressive regime” should be employed instead.For the time being, some outlets have
compromised by using the Chinese label, but using quotation marks “terrorists”
as a distancing mechanism.

The assassination of the imam of the PRC’s largest mosque,
in Kashgar, may eventually convince some fence-sitters in the media of the
existence of an organized movement employing terror as a political instrument.

The PRC government, of course, has already announced its conclusions.

It has poured military and security forces into Xinjiang,
and also employed some measures that have attracted a certain amount of bewilderment
and mockery.

The PRC government seemed to go over-the-top in rewarding locals—30,000 locals by its count!-- who supposedly assisted in rounding up the
alleged perpetrators of the recent massacre:

Authorities in far
west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have announced that more than 300
million yuan (about 48 million U.S. dollars) would be offered in cash rewards
to those who helped hunt suspected terrorists.

More than 10,000 officials and
local residents attended an award ceremony held in Hotan Prefecture Sunday, the
first batch of the rewards.

Altogether 4.23 million yuan were
offered at the ceremony to local residents for their bravery in hunting a group
of 10 suspected terrorists.

Six people who offered key
tip-offs leading to the location of the suspected terrorists were given 100,000
yuan each. More individuals and government agencies received cash rewards.

The LA Times’ Barbara Demick described harassment against
students and government employees trying to honor the Ramadan fast, and a
campaign against forbidden head coverings for women:

At one checkpoint near Kashgar's main
mosque, three Uighur women in colorful, sequined calf-length dresses and a man
in sunglasses sat under a large blue umbrella the weekend before last watching
people shopping for the coming Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marked the end of
Ramadan.

When a motorcycle drove by with two
women and a toddler, they flagged it down and told the woman in back to
dismount. The woman, who looked to be in her 40s, was wearing a long
black-and-white striped dress, a patterned red scarf and a white veil that
covered her mouth and nose.

Within minutes, a white van pulled up
at the checkpoint with a large red sign on the side reading "Strictly
Attack Terrorism and Protect the Stability of Society." The woman climbed
in the van without protest and was driven off, presumably to a Project Beauty
headquarters to be given a lecture on appropriate dress.

In the city of Karamay (an isolated oil outpost in the heart
of the desert and, perhaps, the easiest place to test drive this kind of
policy), per Reuters:

Authorities will
prohibit five types of passengers - those who wear veils, head scarves, a
loose-fitting garment called a jilbab, clothing with the crescent moon and
star, and those with long beards - from boarding buses in the northwestern city
of Karamay, state media said.

…

"Those who do not
comply, especially those five types of passengers, will be reported to the
police," the paper said.

By the traditional calculus of “hearts and minds” (or its
Chinese variant, “hearts and minds and remorseless Han economic, cultural, and
demographic infiltration”), these measures would be seen as ridiculously
counter-productive.

Maybe the CCP is looking at the recent trendlines in
Uighur-related mayhem and has come to the conclusion that “hearts and minds”
isn’t going to cut it.

Or maybe the PRC has decided that China, as a rising world
power, has to learn to play the militarized counterinsurgency game the same way
the grand master, the United States, does.

I look at what the PRC security forces are doing in
Xinjiang, and it reminds me of what the United States did in Iraq’s Anbar
Province.

Those people determinedly engaged in Islamic practice—Ramadan,
beards, headscarves—probably are self-identifying as potential security threats
and end up in a database for surveillance, relational mapping, etc.Maybe it doesn’t yet resemble the massive
database of social and biometric data the US acquired in Iraq, especially in
hot spots like Fallujah (Centcom still holds on to a biometric database including retinal
scans and thumbprints for 3 million Iraqis, 10% of the population of Iraq), but it’s a start.

The ridiculously over-compensated local anti-terrorist
practitioners: they’re also in the system, as assets, like the Anbar
tribespeople who, as a matter of principle and interest, provided tips and
intel or at least passive acquiescence to the US in the war against al Qaeda.At the height of the Anbar Awakening, in 2008, the US
military was paying $300/month salaries to 91,000 Iraqis, a bill of $16 million
per month.

The only thing missing from this equation: the death squads
(in Iraq, the Joint Special Operations Command) and drones (AfPak) that close
the circle.I’m assuming the PRC has
something similar.

I hope the PRC doesn’t believe it can crack the
counterinsurgency puzzle better than the US effort that, despite multiple
iterations and the outlay of tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars
has failed to produce lasting gains in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I also hope the PRC is not looking at an example much closer
to home, which might qualify as the only truly successful
counterinsurgency/anti-separatist action in recent decades: Sri Lanka’s war of annihilation against the Tamil rebels that culminated with the obliteration of
the Tamil forces and tens of thousands of civilian victims on a narrow spit of
land in 2009, a humanitarian horror show made possible largely by the PRC’s steadfast,
multi-year financial, material, and diplomatic support.

And the PRC must also look at the danger of alienating the
Taliban of Afghanistan and other regional Islamist actors, who have heretofore cracked
down on Xinjiang-oriented activity in response to Chinese economic and
diplomatic blandishments.

Militarization of disputes simplify the statement of a
problem, in my opinion, but makes resolution ever more difficult and remote.It is a temptation that, I hope, the PRC and
the US can both resist.

8 comments:

If you watch the Chinese media, you can see that Xinjiang terror attacks are always followed by more Muslim singers and stories of nice Uighur (or other Muslim) PRC citizens. This strategy of hammering the killers, but stressing that Islam with Chinese characteristics (ICC) seems to be more pronounced than in the West. And it might even be honest. While staying in Beiing more than 10 years ago, I was delighted to find a range of positive books on Chinese Islam that stressed the contributions of Chinese Muslims to Chinese civilization and national unity.And let's not forget that the Uighurs have alienated other minorities in Xinjiang. Nobody seems to report on Uighur-on-Kazahk or Uighur-on-Hui violence, for example.